Last weekend we went away to Emalahleni Dam with family. I braved it and joined my Dad and uncle on a very early morning fishing session. We were up before sunrise, dressed warm, and launched the boat on the water by 05:30. Now I’ve tried it only twice before and my track record of catching fish averages a nice big zero.
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| Emalahleni (place of coal) Dam, 22 April 2023 (05:58) |
I went in with some enthusiasm. At the peak of dawn the temperature was relatively warm and as the sun starts breaking the darkness the wind and cooler air begin to pierce your skin. An hour of casting the rod proved fruitless. Yet, large fish teased us, jumping through the water all around the boat. In the quiet of the breaking dawn and as you begin to shrug off the tiredness of waking early, the surroundings are quiet. You simply hear the sound of nature all around. The only sound that breaks the natural silence is the repetition of casting the fishing line and hearing the drop of the bait land in the water.
This experience was something all too familiar to Our Lord. We know that Peter and Andrew were fishermen and would sometimes spend a full night at water fishing with no luck. Jesus encourages them one time to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, and they hauled in 153 fish. Now I had no such luck, I left the weekend with a steady average of catching absolutely no fish, and maybe two occasions where the fish actually nibbled at the bait.
However, the weekend sparked a thought that finding our spouse is no different to fishing. I guess that analogy is often used when people say there is plenty of fish in the sea. To be successful in fishing, you need to choose the right time of day. Fish will be more active at certain times of the day for feeding than at other times. So spending a whole day at the water will probably not guarantee success. The discernment of finding the appropriate bait is required to attract the appropriate type of fish.
Now dating and finding a spouse also involves a lot of patience and trust in finding the most opportune time, place and moment to find the spouse God has prepared for you all along. The process of finding a spouse, just like fishing, requires a series of conditions and a whole lot of cooperation with God.
Now the part of leisure fishing that takes away from the fishing of Peter and Andrew is that with leisure you throw the fish back into the water where they instead fished for a living. If finding that fish requires so much effort, that fish should be like a pearl of great worth that we find and should hold onto. The sacrament of marriage calls us to the same thinking that finding a spouse is for life. Your spouse is there to be by your side till death do you part. Spouses are called to pray for each other, help each other and guide each other through the grace of God to heaven. Simply put to get to heaven as a married couple is only possible through the help of your spouse. That help can take on many forms through cooperation with the will of God and prayer but also in the form of suffering and enduring crosses of life.
The breakdown of society can be strongly associated with the breakdown of the family, which is made possible by a pick-up in divorce rates. Until the 1930s, every Christian denomination condemned contraception until the Anglican Church made history by accepting contraception (Good News about Sex and Marriage).
Since then divorce rates have skyrocketed and coincidentally linked to the endorsement of contraception by all other Christian denominations to this day with the exception of the Catholic Church. Is the Catholic Church stuck in some old-fashioned bubble, or is there a reason for not endorsing contraception? In the simplest terms, contraception is defined as being “contra”, which means to be against conception or the possibility of pregnancy during sexual intercourse.
The Church has such beautiful things to say on this topic from the perspective of being pro-conception. However, to be more relatable with modern society and to debunk the obvious critiques I will quote from the same book above what prominent and non-Catholic thinkers of the 20th century had to say when contraception was endorsed by other denominations.
- “We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it” (Sigmund Freud, neurologist and atheist)
- “If contraceptive methods become the order of the day, nothing but moral degradation can be the result... As it is, man has sufficiently degraded woman for his lust, and contraception, no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her.” (Mohandas Gandhi, leader and Hindu)
- “The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized, but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in waiting it’s collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization and save the world from suicide.” (T.S Eliot, poet and literary critic)
- After the Anglican church endorsed the use of contraception, the remaining churches followed (except for the Catholic Church) the following editorial was published: “... the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be ‘careful and restrained’ is preposterous.” (The Washington Post)
So, in a nutshell, those outside of the Catholic Church predicted that contraception would firstly, in a very purposeful way obstruct the natural function of reproduction in favour of only sexual pleasure. In other words, it introduces the possibility of gluttony, whereby we enjoy the taste of food but bypass the stomach, which will tell us when we have had too much of a good thing. It becomes all pure pleasure without nature’s order to help us avoid using our spouse as an object of our selfish pleasure. Sex is a physical renewal of a spouse's wedding vows they repeated with their words. The wedding vows speak to the promise of loving your spouse and never using them.
Secondly, contraception would give men a license to lust over their wives. Before contraception adultery was there but very rare. The moment barriers to the possibility of conceiving a child were introduced, it gave a man a license to freely seek more sexual pleasure outside of marriage with other women when he got tired of his wife. The possibility of impregnating these other women was now removed, and so it becomes a pleasure without the responsibility or possibility of being caught. So the rise of feminism, LGTBQ+ and modern beliefs is not because times have changed but rather a consequence of something that was disordered in human nature. Breaking the natural order of avoiding the conception of a child is no win as the ugly head of a very confused and distorted society is starting to rear its head.
Thirdly, contraception is a social attempt to create a civilized society with a non-Christian mentality. That sounds a lot like communism. Something which I believe is showing itself in South Africa. We have leaders who do not fear God, make allies with the creators of communism and after suffering the ills of apartheid in our own land refuse to take a stand against Russia’s blatant war in Ukraine. When I have the license to use my wife to fill my sexual pleasure like a bottomless drink, I will get bored of renewing my marriage vows. I will seek more pleasure with women that start to look like objects who are made of parts (that I can self-select) that entice my lust rather than enable me to see her as a human created in God’s image and likeness. I will then start to steal, have no shame in ordering the murder of my neighbour if he dares stand up for the truth and get in my way, and before you know it, we begin building the foundation of the iron curtain in the southern tip of Africa.
Fourth, contraception removes the possibility of children from sex, by removing the need for sex to be contained in the confines of the sacrament of marriage. It becomes so normal for society to start thinking contraceptive. Contraception is not responsible it’s selfish and removes generosity and, ultimately, love. If God is Love, then contraception removes God from marriage. What is the big deal what does that matter? Humans are only co-creators we are not the Creator. When a husband and wife come together in martial love to renew their wedding vows with their bodies, their sperm and egg touch, and if God wills in that moment, he may or may not allow the possibility of life to exist. Contraception starts making us robots where we think we can start creating children in the labs. Artificial insemination, surrogate children, IVF and all that is available today have no control over the outcomes as the scientist is not God. It comes down to pure chance and is a moral evil as we remove the possibility of sex out of the equation and start acting like we can create children with this colour eye, gender, skin tone, genetic attribute etc. If children conceived out of wedlock sometimes grow and struggle with feeling unloved and unwanted, then we need only wait a generation to witness what creating children in labs may trigger for society.
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| Emalahleni (place of coal) Dam, 22 April 2023 (05:58) |
To come back to the fishing story, you can spend all day long at water casting the line hundreds of times without any luck of catching a fish. We spent at least four hours on the water that morning, and between the three of us, we probably cast our rod in about 1,000 times. My uncle caught 3 fish, my Dad and I none. So the probability of catching a fish was roughly 0.3 per cent. The bottom line is that fishing requires a whole lot of faith to trust that you are likely to eventually catch a fish with such low odds.
Finding a spouse is even more difficult, but when you find her, you are called to hold onto her knowing your life depends on it. She is not a fishing trophy to brag about, nor is she a toy to be used and thrown back to fish out another when you are bored of her. Marriage is indissoluble because what God binds together no man can tear apart, and when God says let there be light, there was light, and when He says let there be life, there is life.
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